14 DAY TRIAL // An alarming story from The Washington Post indicates that hackers can turn on the iSight / FaceTime camera on your Mac without you knowing, because they can disable the green LED light which indicates whether the webcam is on or off.
According to the newspaper, a certain Marcus Thomas, who is a former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico, revealed that “the FBI has been able to covertly activate a computer’s camera — without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording — for several years.”
The paper then cites research from Johns Hopkins University as the first public evidence that it’s possible to do activate someone’s webcam without them knowing.
Apparently, the research was done on Macs from 2008 and older, but there’s no guarantee that newer systems aren’t susceptible to similar breaches.
In fact, the authors reportedly said that “similar techniques could work on more recent computers from a wide variety of vendors.”